Friday, November 30, 2018

Identity politics and the Pride Parade

(First published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz, November 29.)

There was something strangely
familiar about the spectacle of the LGBTQ+ movement chewing itself up over the
Auckland Pride Parade.

It was vaguely reminiscent of
the destructive paroxysms that convulsed New Zealand’s communist Left
throughout the 1950s, 60s and 70s as rival factions competed to show who was
most faithful to Marxist-Leninist ideology.

The feuding began when Moscow
and Beijing fell out and New Zealand communists split into Soviet and Maoist
camps. The plotting and infighting was so vicious and all-consuming that no one
had any energy left to fight the supposed common enemy, capitalism.

As the doctrinal differences
became ever more esoteric and breakaway groups peeled off in new directions,
the squabbling only seemed to intensify. As a wise Frenchman wrote a long time
ago, revolutions have a way of devouring their own.

Meanwhile, life went on.
Mainstream New Zealand was only dimly aware, if at all, of the feuding among
its suburban armchair revolutionaries.

There are faint echoes of
that era in the turmoil over the Pride Parade. In one sense, as political
scientist Bryce Edwards has pointed out, the dispute over whether uniformed
police should be allowed to join the parade was simply a classic clash between
pragmatists and purists.

The pragmatic moderates want
to work alongside the establishment. They accept that police harassment of gays
is in the past.

The radicals, however,
obviously place a high value on their status as an oppressed minority and are
determined to remain on the margins.

Ideologically, it suits them
to view the police as fascist enforcers of white male supremacy. In their own
eyes, no doubt, they remain ideologically pure while the original gay
custodians of the parade have sold out.

Both stances raise
interesting questions. In respect of the mainstream gay movement, the question
is whether there even needs to be a Pride Parade.

Gay rights is no longer the
edgy cause it once was. Homosexuality has been legal for more than 30 years and
gays are allowed to marry.

If homosexuality is now seen
as accepted and unremarkable, which is surely what the gay lobby has campaigned
for over the past few decades, then the battle has been won and gays have no
more need of a “pride” parade than indoor bowlers or model train hobbyists.

But the more interesting
question relates to the zealots who banned uniformed police from participating, despite all their efforts to ingratiate themselves with the gay community. Here in full view, once again, is the neo-Marxist phenomenon known as identity
politics, whereby minority groups define themselves by their point of
difference – whether it be gender, class, race, sexual identity, disability or
age – and by their perception of themselves as oppressed.

The activists love to talk
about inclusivity but in truth, they rejoice in their apartness and have little
interest in aligning themselves with the mainstream. After all, why diminish
what defines you?

Besides, it’s no longer a
simple case of a single, homogenous “queer” community asserting itself, because
the queer community has split into multiple factions, all pushing different
agendas and sometimes fighting among themselves – just as in the communist cadres
of the 50s and 60s.

New groups seem to appear by
the week. It’s getting hard to navigate in this increasingly complex ideological
landscape.

Not only do we now have to
get our heads around a “trans” community that virtually no one had heard of a
year ago, and whose agenda provoked a backlash from feminists, but we’ve also
been introduced to a neo-Marxist theory called intersectionality.

Wikipedia defines this as “an
analytic framework that attempts to identify how interlocking systems of power
impact [on] those who are the most marginalised in society”.

Intersectionality grew out of
resentment at the domination of the feminist movement by white middle-class
women. It holds that if you’re a lesbian, working-class woman of colour, you’re
far more oppressed than a Pakeha woman who lives in a restored Thorndon villa and
teaches women’s studies at university.

In this new hierarchy of the
oppressed, it goes without saying that middle-class gay men just don’t cut it
anymore. Small wonder that they’ve lost control of the Pride Parade.

Meanwhile, as with the
communist schisms of the mid-20th century, ordinary New Zealand gets
on with life. After all, identity politics and the associated culture wars are
the concerns of a tiny portion of the population.

But the row over the Pride
Parade is the tip of a rather ominous iceberg. The difference between the
mid-20th century and today is that whereas the old-school communists
never achieved influence beyond the trade unions, today’s neo-Marxists have got
traction in politics, education, the media, the arts and even the churches.

And their aims are similar:
to undermine, destabilise and ultimately deconstruct mainstream society. We
ignore them at our peril.

5 comments:

Well said Karl. I have been awaiting your next chapter on the "progressive" left for some time. This did not disappoint. One thing that still puzzles me about the postmodern, cultural marxist left is that it has no particular political structure or leadership framework (the social policy wing of the greens is the nearest there is). It is nebulous, like grasping at smoke. Although undoubtedly they seek an authoritarian socialist state (as capitalism is their enemy), to actually put together a political structure would require committing to specific policies. That of course would open them up to easy criticism, as marxist socialism has been an abject failure everywhere it has been tried. Even China turned to a form of authoritarian collectivist capitalism. I have renewed belief that the west will survive the postmodern threat by virtue of our flexibility in taking on new ideas. The valid concerns of minority (identity politics) groups will be addressed over time in the same way that gay rights have been widely established and accepted. That will leave the marxists with only ever increasingly ridiculous points to attempt to score off and there support will diminish.

Karl, one area of influence you neglected to mention is the world of large corporates. In these 'woke' organisations, most of whom have undergone LGBTI+ certification, (no, I'm not making this up) it's not enough to possess a 'live and let live' attitude to your fellow LGBTI+ colleagues, you have to become an active 'ally', someone who is affirming all things LGBTI+ and fighting 'homophobia' in the work place.

In many corporates you get to wear a pin, or have a sticker on your locker to identify as a straight ally. Of course you are free not to register as an ally, not to wear the pin, not to have the sticker on your locker....

Just like Kramer didn't need to wear the ribbon in the AIDS march... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iV8X8ubGCc

To be a 'refusenik' in these modern ideological Gulags is usually noted on your personal file.

Following the Canterbury earthquakes, and the mess they left behind, making do with what [infrastructure] one had became known as 'the new normal’. The same appears to be happening in respect of the LGBT (plus whatever other letters of the alphabet are added nowadays).

Alternative types mentioned in your article will never be satisfied with being accepted as different, their goal - in addition to what you identify - is to mess with what the great majority regard as normal, eg. heterosexuality. They are, disgracefully in my view, assisted by much of the media, scarcely a day going by without the sympathetic and at times forceful reporting of some activist(s) clamouring for attention and pushing an agenda.

Hi Karl. Why make the analogy with communism? You could have chosen christian faith, as just one example. The in-fighting there got pretty mean back in the day...

Plus who is this "we" who should not ignore them? That "we" makes me a bit nervous. Am I part of the "we"? Who else is part of the "we"? Is it a group I would want to be part of? And what else do we like to do, apart from get nervous about socio-communists etc? Who else don't we like?

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.